Goal and Motive
3:50:44 2024-09-01 946

Will the object or position you fancy actually make you happier? Wasted effort and disappointment can happen when we confuse goals with motives and means with ends. This happens more often than it seems. To choose the best means to your ends, you need to know the psychological difference between goal and motive.

Smart creatures have goals

All animals react to the situation here and now. Some are smarter; they can also imagine objects and situations beyond the here and now: They are able to have mental representations. Great apes do, and it's likely dogs do too. In any case, humans do.

Representations allow us to imagine, to picture, a desired state and its consequences. For example, a state that would better satisfy our motives. When hungry, you can imagine eating a sandwich and then different ways of getting that sandwich. Interestingly, being able to imagine different alternatives (e.g., making a sandwich, ordering one, stealing one) creates the possibility of a decision, a choice of the best way to get to the final imagined state (here, eating the sandwich) and possible consequences (no longer being hungry). This is the story of our lives: deciding what we want and why, and trying to get there. We act with purpose. A good life, it seems, has a lot to do with making good choices. But what is the psychology behind our "choices"?

 

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